Jason Calacanis Keynote — Search Engine Strategies

Jason Calacanis participated in the keynote discussion at Search Engine Strategies this morning. The big news is that Jason has accepted a position at Sequoia Capital as Entrepreneur in Action. Now he is looking for an idea to create a startup with. Listen to the audio files at the end of this post.

Some of the other things he spoke about include:

• On Netscape/AOL: I was there for a year and it was very educational. I am an entrep. and I could have left at any time from Netscape. We had an arrangement that I would stay for a year and I would stay longer if they made me President. Out of nowhere they fired the CEO supposedly, and I was like, this was my guy and so I thought I needed to do my own thing. I felt confident that Netscape and Weblogs was in a good place.
• Do you think you would do something in hardware?
  I mentioned it on my blog about a mp3 player that is DRM-less. And somehow it got picked up on all of the big blog sites.
• Talk about Netscape…
  I remember Mosaic, the blink tag, when each browser would be colossal. AOL created Firefox. One of the suggestions was to turn off Netscape and point it to AOL. I thought there was a social news concept and let’s bring it to the masses today. The people who say we copied Digg are the 12 year old people on Digg. Digg did not have any editorial safeguards on it. We wanted someone to check the facts, and so we put editorial controls on it. Even if Valleywag says that we aren’t. The pageviews are going up.
• When you work at a big company, you can’t act like a startup guy.
• Payperpost is evil. The intent of the site is to do deceptive marketing. ReviewMe could work - if they put in the first sentence about the payment.
• Netscape - We tried a concept of paying people for their work. We thought to pay the top diggers $1,000 a month to put 150 stories on Netscape. They did more than just post stories; they got rid of spam and taught other users how to use the system. The top users also helped with teaching us what the problems are on Digg. They helped us make the product better. And helped us with consolidating stories by creating a de-duping story.

Audio Files

Part I - Discusses hiring by Sequoia Capital(download mp3)

Part II - discusses Digg, Netscape, TechCrunch and other misc comments (download mp3)

Part III - Discusses Payperpost and other general industry comments including word association (download mp3)